


Deus Ex: hi0ctane Run

by AgentKaz, RememberPanchaea



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games), Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Canon Divergence, Character Death, Cyberpunk, Established Relationship, M/M, Transhumanism, Uploaded Consciousness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-12-26 20:08:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18289364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgentKaz/pseuds/AgentKaz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/RememberPanchaea/pseuds/RememberPanchaea
Summary: Václav Koller had never expected the backups he was making to be more than just an easy way to get his cranial aug's settings back in case of an emergency. When he's killed thanks to a deal gone way, way wrong, he learns that death doesn't have to be the end. Good thing, too, because Adam Jensen's got too much on his plate to lose him.MachineGod, eat your heart out.





	Deus Ex: hi0ctane Run

# CHAPTER ONE: Everything to Lose

\-----------------------------------------------------

**❱❱❱❱❱ PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC**

**NOVEMBER 5, 2029 // 1:47 AM**

Martial Law has been declared. Curfew from  
10 PM until 6 AM is in effect. Anyone on the  
streets is subject to detainment by local law  
enforcement officials, effective immediately.

\-----------------------------------------------------

_“You’re sure about this, Agent?”_

_“Positive. We’ll need to plan carefully and act soon."_

_“I’ll pass it along and we’ll contact you when it’s time to roll out. In the meantime, head home. Shower, get some rest. I’ll call you.”_

Jim Miller was always straight with him. Adam would have been lying if he said he didn’t appreciate that. After years of nothing but being run around and getting spoon fed false information and horse shit endlessly from a vat that never seemed to empty, Jim’s honesty was a relief.

But in the meantime, Prague was oversaturated with its own trash that needed taken out and nobody would pass the laws required to open the dumpster.

_Fucking fantastic._

Adam couldn’t wait to get home, pull up his computer chair and give Václav a call. Hearing a voice that didn’t make his teeth itch could prove beneficial today. Nothing was really going right.

Maybe he’d hold off on telling Václav that he’d gotten dosed with the Orchid, or maybe not telling him at all would be better.

_Yeah. Let’s go with that one._

Though truth be told, he couldn’t have known that the shit hitting the fan wasn’t about to stop anytime soon. The Time Machine had never gotten fixed, and in the bowels of the sewers, it had left his lab in a state of disarray that wasn’t so easily patched up with some spackle and a fresh coat of paint.

 

* * *

 

There was a lot that could have been done upstairs. There were bookshelves to right and destroyed items to throw away, but Václav had more important things to do. Or maybe he just didn’t want to go back upstairs and look at all of that. Too much to do all at once. Sure, it’d need to be done eventually.  
  
But that could come later. He finally had some improvements he could make on his brain interface, and instead of cleaning shit up upstairs, he was gonna pretend everything was okay and update his shit. The Dungeon was safe. The Time Machine was still technically closed while everything was disheveled, so he wasn’t expecting any upstairs customers, and he didn’t have any appointments and any walk-ins would have to call first. It was fine.

Besides, Prague was effectively burning outside and nobody was allowed on the streets in the first place.

Making sure all the wires he used to hook himself up were in place (sure, wireless was easier, but it was less secure), he sat down in The Chair, leaning back and closing his eyes as a flood of information passed across the mental HUD. Everything was updating as normal, and he checked the experimental software he’d been running to see if the backups were doing okay.

There was absolutely zero guarantee the backups were actually backups, but it didn’t hurt to try it out.

What was supposed to be a quiet half-hour or so didn’t last very long, however, the sound of shouting breaking him out of his thoughts and his work. At first he thought it was coming from the sewer, but it wasn’t really coming from that direction when he paid attention, and instead it was coming from… upstairs, but not upstairs enough.

It was the elevator. Who the fuck--?  
  
Václav couldn’t disconnect himself and go hide, though. As much as he’d made it so he could update everything his way on his own time with his own well-checked versions of software, disconnecting in the middle of something like this could brick his fucking systems and with how augmented he was, that was an extremely bad idea.

Hoping that whoever was coming down had just accidentally stumbled upon his office, and his secret book, and his secret elevator, and was just shouting for no particular reason, he grabbed an arm from the closest table he could reach. It was a lousy weapon, but he wasn’t exactly equipped to fight back against much anyway.

Everything happened too fast after that. He threw the arm - he knew that much - when the shouting voices that could only belong to Otar’s goons moved out of the elevator and towards him and the chair. It didn’t do much. More shouting. Loud noises. Pain. Everything shutting down.

Wow, that really fucking hurt.

 

* * *

 

“This couldn’t be any more of a pain in the ass, could it?”

Adam mumbled his dry commentary into the open air, to nobody in particular. It was going to take work to get back to Překážka District. Once he was home, he was going to live in the shower for a while. The rain was cold, and skulking around in soaked clothing wasn’t doing his mental state any favors.

Slipping up behind an officer, he dropped his cloak and tapped a shoulder. She wheeled around and was greeted with carbon fibre and a nap. It would be alright, surely. He was certain she’d appreciate the break. After all, these cops here in Prague just worked themselves to the bone.

Catching her body before she had a chance to hit the ground, he tucked his hands under her arms and dragged her out of the way, settling her behind a dumpster in the alley way. He could have put a round in her. There was a part of him that definitely wanted to, especially after everything he’d witnessed in Útulek Complex. Maybe there was once a time where he believed that the police were just misguided, misinformed and needed to be educated.

Those days were gone now, along with so much innocence lost on his own part. He learned far more than he ever truly wanted to know.

Stepping over the fallen officer’s body, Adam moved to peer around the corner of a building and lifted a hand. The ring on his thumb’s base flickered to life, illuminating a spot in the patch of darkness he was tucked into. After a couple seconds of fiddling, the deployable ladder dropped down and unfolded itself.

Hand over hand, he briskly ascended to the rooftops and made his way toward Pilgrim Station. Knowing the trains weren’t running and he’d have to walk the tracks, he wasn’t looking forward to spending time with his thoughts. The shingles rattled dangerously underfoot as he moved. A statement he never thought would cross his mind did in that moment, and he considered how much more safe it felt to traverse rooftops in Detroit. They were flat, and definitely didn’t feel like they were going to come apart under his boots.

Peering over the edge, he chose a side that was out of view, and dropped down. The flare of light from the Icarus Landing System illuminated the alleyway briefly enough that nobody took notice. Perfect. The station wasn’t far, and before he knew it, he’d slipped down the stairs and into the metro proper. Maddening without the sound of rain to keep him from the inside of his head, he ran the tracks rather than taking his time to walk.

No, we can sort out all of this bullshit up there later. Or maybe never. That sounded more ideal given the circumstances.

 

* * *

 

Waking up was always an issue. Václav Koller was not a man who got a lot of sleep, and often when he finally did it was because he'd finally crashed after being up so long, and his systems always took some time to recover and reboot. So that wasn't the odd thing. And the fact that he couldn't move wasn't that weird either. He wasn't really a morning person, so he probably was just taking some time to get going. His brain took a while to wake up, his limbs were connected to the brain, so it’d just be slow going for a while.

The problem here was the information overload as he slowly found himself coming back to consciousness, like he was looking in way too many directions at once. Seeing things he wasn't supposed to see. Having more trouble focusing than he normally would on wakeup.

Something was off. What he saw kept changing.

Different parts of the Dungeon, different parts of the Time Machine, the sewer outside, the front of the building, blood that seemed newer than what had already stained the floor around The Chair, different parts of the Time Machine again... wait. Wait. He tried to cycle back to the last vision, trying not to panic. And he did the only thing he could think of at the moment, frozen and overwhelmed as he was.

He called Jensen.

 

* * *

 

A quiet static sound popped in his ear, before the chime of a system alerted him. He paused on the steps, and the voice that filtered through his InfoLink was familiar, and yet something was off. It sounded almost… modulated?

“J-Jensen?” it uttered, and it sounded nervous.

His feet stopped, rooting himself in place. The furrow of his brows accompanied his mirror shades retracting, and he turned his head to the side.

“... Vác? You sound different.” Alarms were raising in his head already. The distorted quality of the words on top of the shakiness wasn’t helping, either.

"Jensen! Thank _fuck_ , man." The relief in his voice, at least, was pretty obvious, although he seemed a little distracted as well. It was definitely Václav, however, despite the audio distortions.

“Are you alright?” It was his turn to sound hesitant, but he fell to silence almost immediately as Václav began to babble to himself.

"How do I fucking-- no, I'm not trying to look at-- Look, uh, I'm having a little, uh, issue right now. You think you can come down here sometime?"

He nodded to himself more than to Václav. Adam had a tendency to forget that video wasn’t exactly included with an InfoLink. He was just used to the days when Francis was able to get feed from his eyes, and old habits would always die hard.

"You... you know, whenever you get the chance. Sorry. It's, uh, not something you're gonna wanna hear over the InfoLink."

The nod snapped to a shaking of his head, and Adam blurted out, “No, it’s fine, don’t apologize.” Something was wrong and he could feel it. “Look, stay put okay? I’ll be over in just a few minutes.”

“I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere,” Václav said dryly, sounding a little distracted as he did. He was still trying to make sense of what he was seeing, trying to slow it down, and trying to _control_ the flow of information-- why was there so much information?

“I’ll try not to be too long, but things are a fucking mess right now,” he said, already moving again. He ducked down, staying as low as he could. Adam was running low on biocells, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. A hand dipped down into his pocket to fish for one and he slotted it into the appropriate port. It sapped the charge, and he watched his own battery meter fill.

“That should be enough,” he murmured under his breath, discarding the spent cell onto the ground quietly. The Glass-Shield deployed and went live, sweeping across his body as he kicked on the sound dampeners.

Adam ran. There was zero regard for taking his time now, though he might have if only he’d known. ‘If only’ was something he found himself stuck on so often. It would turn to another ‘if only’ the moment his eyes found yet another truth he never wanted.

The cloak and the sound dampeners went offline the moment his feet crossed the threshold of the front door, and he barreled through. His breathing was still shallow following being poisoned, and he knew it’d be some time before he was fully recovered. Regardless, being winded wasn’t something he was used to.

He climbed the stairs, turned the corner, and turned left again. Ducking down, he slipped under the fallen bookcase, before vaulting over the next. It was a route he’d memorized not so much out of necessity as routine. Usually, however, he never had to worry about quite so many obstacles in his path.

Václav tried to relax a little. Adam was coming, so he could just focus on trying to breathe.  Heh, breathe. He wasn't breathing any time soon, that was becoming obvious. One of these days it was going to really sink in. Right now, though, it was clear he was, well, booting up was the best way to describe it.. Probably took a long time for the software to work. To _work_. He never thought the backup would actually be a thing, but apparently-

The elevator doors slid open, and Adam stumbled out into Václav’s lab. He immediately raised his voice to a shout. “Vác? Where are you? I’m here!”  
  
As Adam showed up, it broke Václav out of his thoughts, although he had already registered him going through the shop, which was weird to think about. It was probably for the better that he was here. He could work this shit out better with him here, probably. It would give him something to focus on.

“I’m here, man!” he called out, voice coming from… somewhere. His voice sounded relieved but also strangely inorganic. It caused Adam to glance around, though he blocked out the particular quality. His mind stomped it out, preventing him from registering the tone and how it was wrong… how it sounded so bleak.

For once, Adam’s steps felt heavier than he could manage, legs weighted and feet rooted in place. He struggled to move forward. The air felt oppressive around him, and an awful sensation twisted in his gut. Shaky steps, one at a time, finally saw him moving again. For some reason, as he moved forward, everything in his body refused to allow him to look to the left. Perhaps he knew, subconsciously, somehow, that he would regret it.

Adam stepped over to Václav’s ‘bedroom’ and peered across to the terminal, hoping to find him in his computer seat. Of course, he wasn’t there. Things were never so easy, after all. He wasn’t in his bed either, and his eyes even glanced up at the clown on the ceiling before his mind would ever allow him to face the surreal thought of turning.

Yet he knew he had to.

The moment stretched out infinitely as he finally turned his head, and the steps he now walked were harder than any he’d ever been forced to take in his life.

“I, uh… hi,” Václav said, sounding about as sheepish as the quality of his voice could get.. “Sorry about the mess. I’m still trying to figure out what happened.”

The voice that Adam was hearing wasn’t coming out of the body haphazardly shoved into his chair.

As Václav’s perception flickered from view to view, he tried to make better sense of what he was seeing in the flashes of what he got. When he tried to focus on a single image, it switched to another, and when he tried to just let the information flow, everything overwhelmed his vision at once. Adam was moving around, he could tell that much. He was going to find the body eventually. He was-- yeah, there he was.

Adam’s steps came to a slow, heavy stop, standing at the edge of his work area. For once in his goddamn life, he couldn’t bring himself to pull the lenses of his shades back, and his mouth opened wordlessly as Václav greeted him. But it didn’t take long before his walls came crashing down. The lenses retracted on eyes that were wide and his face was pale like it had never been before.

> > red_

_Blood… There’s..._

> > red_

_...so much blood..._

“V-Vác?” Adam found his voice, and he regretted the sound it made. He moved forward, more stumbling than stepping. “Vác- Václav?” _Don’t._

“Why- why can I hear you? You a-... aren’t… you’re not… where?” _Hallucination?_ “Wake up?” Adam approached the chair and his throat tightened up, eyes darting around the scene and struggling to take everything in. “D-do I unplug this? What do I-... what do I do?”

"I'm still trying to... _fuck_ why is this so hard to fucking access-- I can't see anything for very long. I think... I think it's the cameras. But I can't-- ugh, fucking _stop that_ \-- I can't control it."

That probably didn't make very much sense, did it? But he was still trying to pull everything together, pull himself together, piece together what must have happened past what he remembered. Maybe he could access the security footage? But to do that, he'd have to figure out how to control things. If he managed, then he could at least explain what he thought happened.

Adam’s knees hit the floor, his hands clutching the arm of the chair and looking over him frantically. _Where is the blood coming from?_ “V-Vác how do I-... how?”

He wasn’t moving and Adam’s heart stopped beating.

> what was that about no longer being human?
> 
> machines don't cry, Adam

Process it.

_I'm fucking trying!_

"Jensen?"

No, he had to gather his head. He was trying. Václav said his name. He was talking. Every sound was muffled, and he was lost under the ocean again. Adam could barely make it out, and light filtered through the unreal haze he was lost in, but reality was diluted and desaturated and it felt... dark.

 _Fuck_. Václav should have thought about how Adam was going to react, but he still wasn't thinking clearly anyway. Even if he was, everything was rushing at him at high speeds and he was just there trying to make sense of it all, and now Adam was here but he couldn't even touch him. All he could do was talk, and he had a feeling saying everything was gonna be okay wasn't gonna do shit. He couldn’t even convince _himself_ everything was gonna be okay.

There was a cold fear in Adam’s chest, and the overwhelming sense of being alone was suffocating. Focus. He had to focus. Maybe there was something he could do. He glanced up, watching pips and glimpses of a familiar figure through distorted visuals on the screen. Glitches, scrambled signals and static pops of noise and picture.

"I... I made a backup, man. I didn't think it was actually gonna work, like it wasn't like I could check it or anything, you know? What was I gonna do? Run a little Koller Tamagotchi on my computer?"

Adam tried to focus long enough to register what Václav was saying and what he was seeing. He tried to laugh at the absurdity of the Tamagotchi comment, but the sound that came out was fractured and uneven.

Václav realized he was getting off-track. "Look, I’m on the computer or something, I dunno. And I've got a speaker system in here, and I think that's where I'm talking from." That seemed to make sense enough, anyway. "I... I think fucking Otar had his goons kill me.” Yeah, that wasn't going to help Adam very much, he was pretty sure.

Adam lifted his head, slowly rising to his feet and approaching the monitor closest to the chair. Standing in place, peering into the digital display, he managed to find his voice long enough to ask, “You… you uploaded yourself?” This wasn’t real. You couldn’t do this… right?

“I don’t know, man, I didn’t think I’d ever get this far!” he shouted, or he would have shouted if he was using a real voice and not whatever approximation came out of the speakers. He definitely _meant_ to shout, though, frustration pushing through.

There. The face Václav was catching glimpses of peering into the monitors was streaked with the thin lines of tears that Adam didn’t even realize he’d spilled. His expression was nothing short of haunted. He was crying. Václav didn’t like that.

He didn’t like any of this. He’d done so well at hiding his shit, keeping people out who didn’t need to know, and doing what was asked of him when he needed to. But now his fucking _corpse_ was taking up real estate in his chair while he tried to figure out how to deal with being shoved into a computer.

“I-I’m trying to figure shit out! I’m trying to-... I’m _trying,_ man. I don’t know what I’m fucking doing!” Hard to admit, considering he knew a hell of a lot about what he was doing when it came to augs, but this was more experimental than anything he’d worked with before. And he was trying to explain something he didn’t even have the words to explain to someone who probably didn’t need the entire fucking technical explanation, not with that face. He wasn’t even sure if he _could_ cry, himself. Had he uploaded that, too? Would that start working any second now? It should have been _devastating_ to see how Adam was crying, from the brief glimpses he got, and in a way it was. But in another way, he felt detached, like everything was happening to someone else.

The red warnings in Adam’s vision were still flashing, telling him things he already knew. Every breath he drew was quivering. He couldn’t even respond properly to the uncharacteristic flares of panic in Václav’s speech. The tone wasn’t right, but he knew the cadences of his speech patterns well enough that his brain filled in the blanks for him.

Ah… Adam never expected their first fight to be like this.

> your first and last

Whatever sick, intrusive thought slithered its way into his skull hardened his expression.

But how do you comfort someone who isn’t here? He couldn’t even comfort himself. His heart was hammering. This was not something Václav was planning to do today.

“Vác, please.” _Don’t…_ “Please tell me I can get you back?” The sheen across his eyes built again and finally spilled, helpless to stop it. He didn’t care enough about stopping it anymore. “You can’t… leave me? I can’t-... I can’t do this alone, Vác! I need you!” His voice finally broke but it didn’t crack. It splintered like a snapped board. It welled up and he inhaled, and finally he looked down.

Václav let out what sounded like a sigh as Adam wiped his hands down his face. He inhaled sharply to pull a breath in.  
  
“But I’m _here_ , man. It worked. I’m not… I’m not leaving. I’d never leave you. I’m just not… in there anymore,” Václav reassured.

_Fuck!_

He broke again when the words he needed met his ears, but just barely. _He’ll never leave me._ But he wasn’t in there anymore, and Adam wanted nothing more than to (save him) hold him in his arms, and that thought wasn’t much better.

Václav paused, going quiet. He was getting a better grip on how to keep his view on what he was trying to look at, although only briefly. There was his body, with more bleeding holes than it was certainly supposed to have. “How the _fuck_ am I gonna eat Chicken Foot?”

Humor had always been the way Václav coped with fear and anxiety. Adam learned that early on, and he always tried to indulge him. An awkward laugh that could spare him prolonged discomfort was no skin off Adam’s back.

It wasn’t working tonight. All that came out was an airy, rough whisper of breath.

Noticing the joke had fallen flat, Václav decided to continue his explanation in hopes it might help somehow. “I-it was something I figured out when I was trying to experiment with mental augs. I noticed that if you monitored the brain just right, you could… well, you could sort of have it save things. I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of things, but there were things. I figured it was just some kind of configuration information or something, you know? Like if my augs got fried I could just reset ‘em. So I’ve been letting it save its backups for a while, just in case. If nothing happened, no big deal, it would’ve been the same thing either way.”

Squeezing his eyes tightly shut, Adam inhaled once - sharply - then exhaled heavily. He didn’t understand most of what he was being told. Even if he’d been in any condition to be taught, he may not have comprehended a lot of it. All he knew was that he needed to stabilize himself, and busy his hands and his head, preferably with figuring out an answer to this. “Tell me… what to do,” he managed to hiss out. He swallowed the second surge back down, steeling up.

> put those defenses back up, Adam
> 
> those walls will save you again

For once, there wasn’t anything between himself and someone he loved that he could hammer down with enough carbon fibre and hatred to reach. That was perhaps the most devastating part of any of this. All these tools he had at his disposal were worthless in this situation.

Lifting his hand, Adam placed it against the monitor. The slow flex and flatten of fingers, the loose spread and the distortion wave of the monitor being touched flashed across what glimpses Václav had of him. Something in Václav’s perception changed, however briefly, and he noticed it immediately. Oh, that… that was different. Was the monitor responding to touch, trying to work as a new body for him or something? Maybe he was just going crazy from all the excessive mental stimulation?  It was probably just the webcam, but he wanted to believe it was a little more palpable, and a little more ‘real’, because as time went on and he found himself ‘waking up’ more, he was realizing things. It was becoming extremely obvious how he’d never really touch anything again, and how the last time he and Adam held hands was truly the last time.

 _Fuck_. He couldn’t panic, even though he was absolutely panicking. He had to try and keep it together, to avoid doing anything that could compromise what he had now. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was that kept him holding on, after all, and until he was sure he could be stable with this, he didn’t know if he could even stay where he was.

But he told Adam he’d never leave him, and he meant it.

“I’m… _We’re_ … going to figure this out,” Adam stated.

> > pain_

This wasn’t the sort of wound the Sentinel could mend. No amount of painkillers was going to deaden this sensation. Turning from the screen, his palm left it and he moved over to the main terminal cluster at Václav’s desk. There was a renewed determination in his step. It was the gait of a man who refused to give up after he’d already blamed himself for Panchaea. It was the gait of a man who was still fighting.

If only he’d tried harder, maybe things would have been different. That’s what he’d told himself, and tonight Adam was determined to try harder.

But all those battles felt so impersonal compared to this.

Adam was closing off doors. Like a ship that was flooding, the bulkhead doors were being sealed to isolate it and salvage the sinking vessel. No. No, he was going to fix this. He had no idea how, granted, but he’d never accomplished anything by just giving up.

“What’s the password to your computer, Václav?” Adam asked, and he startled out of his head. His thoughts shifted, away from the flickering camera footage and everything that came with it, and instead focused on Adam’s voice. He noticed it wasn’t framed like a question, and something told Václav that he wasn’t going to wait for it if he refused to hand it over.

“I want to see if I can kill the feeds for all but a couple cameras and monitors,” Adam informed him. While his knowledge of computers and cybernetics was next to none, he at least knew his way around security systems.

“Shit, yeah. That might… that might work,” Václav admitted. “Everything’s just fucking coming to me from everywhere. It’s fucking distracting. Maybe… yeah. That’ll be good. Less to see, right?” He willfully gave Adam the password without any hesitation. Despite being inside his own systems, he couldn’t figure out how to access anything in any meaningful way. It was all just noise. If Adam could cut down that noise, maybe he could work better, and build it up from there.

Václav waited as Adam logged in, the subtle sound of sleek fingers dancing across the keys serving as the only real indication he was working. In the meantime, Václav tried to just let all the footage flow over him, making an attempt to see what he could grab out of the stream of information, patterns that he could recognize, things he could utilize later when he had a better grasp of what to do. Once he was logged in, Adam located the security systems.

“You’ve got about as many camera feeds in here as Sarif had,” Adam commented, attempting to reach for a different conversational topic for even a moment.

Václav had every right to be paranoid with the Dvali breathing down his neck, and he had the cameras to match. “Yeah, Iiiiiii, uh… I like knowing what’s going on.” Not that all the security measures in the world had helped him here. But when he’d been able to watch them normally, they’d helped him know if he needed to be upstairs or downstairs, and when it was a better option to simply hide.

“I’m gunna turn several of these off. Tell me if things start to clear up,” he called out to Václav. One fell offline, then two. Three, four, five and then a sixth went offline as he switched the feeds off one at a time. As they dropped, Václav’s view went blank for a second before switching to a different one. A seventh finally went offline, and half were gone. Adam pulled away from the computer to cross the room, making his way from one monitor to the next and turning them off. Eventually, he paused and they were left with... three. The ones closest to The Chair remained on and Adam was doing his best to not turn around and look at the body in the seat behind him.

He couldn’t stand the reality of having to turn and face that body - his body, the body of his boyfriend. It was clawing at the back of his mind and deep down he knew he was going to have to face that reality. The reality of the flesh and blood and bone and machinery that still remained. Perhaps Václav himself - in the truest definition of self - had survived his death, but there were consequences to all of this. Adam wasn’t certain how he’d handle any of this once the numbness from shock would begin to fade.  
  
But while Adam wrestled with his inner demons, Václav’s view continued to shift, until all that was left was a few cameras in the dungeon. He took a moment to adjust, trying to get a better look at things.

"Is that…” Adam interrupted himself when the sound came out awkwardly, clearing his throat. “Is that any clearer? Can you see now?"

Three was definitely manageable, Václav decided, even if the feeds were still a little overwhelming to process all at the same time. He could start with this, then maybe figure out how to start turning the cameras back on one by one by himself once he was more comfortable with this way of viewing things. He let out a sigh of relief, more out of habit than anything else. "Fuck, man, it was like everything in the world was coming at me at once. Couldn't get a good look at anything. Thanks."

And on the monitor that he'd seemed to favor before, a vague humanoid figure that looked a whole lot like Václav was starting to get a little clearer.

Adam watched the images coalesce. Was that the word? It was the only way to describe watching sections of a digitized Václav slot into place, like pieces of a picture that had been cut out and now were put back. "I don't blame you," Adam said, his voice distant. The static that crackled through the image was still making things fuzzy, but at least he could see him.

Rapidly glitching here and there, rotating through every hex code variant of Vaclav's colour palette it could manage, popping zooms and strange angles into view, it was all a bit much. But he didn't feel so alone now. Having someone familiar with him here in all of this, even if they were only a picture on a screen, went a long way to helping him stabilize. But still, in the back of his mind, he could feel the building storm gathering on the horizon. Adam would never truly know peace after tonight, not in the way he so desired, and the coming days were braced to be the hardest of his life.

Using one of the cameras, Václav could see the image of himself getting clearer on the monitor, and it was weird. He hadn't expected anything like this to be part of the backup, but then again he'd been running blind with all of that shit anyway. Having his entire consciousness on the computer, why wouldn't it construct some sort of avatar out of his image of himself? It made about as much fucking sense as the rest of the whole ordeal. Perhaps the mind didn’t enjoy existing as a formless entity, and crafted itself a vessel, even if it was merely made of light on a screen arranged in a familiar manner.

The quiet nod Adam gave was the only answer he received, watching the screen carefully as he finally saw... a him that wasn't lifeless and moving.

> you'll never hold him again

_Fucking stop it!_

"I'm... I'm-" Get it out. "I'm just happy to see you... moving... again." He swallowed it back down. Don't do this. You can break down later. He had to help Václav figure this out. There wasn’t time for a breakdown. This was more important.

Adam glanced aside, swallowed, inhaled... exhaled. Glancing back up at him, he nodded again. "I just... I don't understand, Vác. I didn't even know this kind of thing was possible." A hand lifted to his temple, before Adam gestured inanely in a circular motion. "I'm... not hallucinating, right? I'm not? This isn't just shock and my brain trying to make sense of something it doesn't want to see?" The crackle of his sinuses as he sniffed interrupted his thoughts. He attempted to piece together something, anything, to say.

It was side-swept by a realization that was the equivalent of a train hitting a car on the tracks.

Adam turned from him suddenly, looking to his body in the chair, and at first it seemed like he’d intended to walk away, but never got that far. It sank in. Finally, it was sinking in. "You're really in there. You're in the computer. So you're... you converted yourself, somehow... or maybe the backup went live when you died?" _Take comfort in knowing he's not gone._ "You're real," he decided. "This is you, talking to me. This is everything about you, but... but on a drive? All your memories, your skills, everything you learned and everything... that's you, like as a person." Adam was working through it, making sense of what was going on, but the process was slow. It was understandable. He was in shock, in grief.

In... grief.

The still somewhat blurry image on-screen lifted an arm as if it was looking at it, although Václav could really only see it from the outside. Maybe it would take some time for him to really feel himself in there. "Far as I know, it's me, unless I'm hallucinating too, and I definitely feel less like I'm hallucinating now than I did earlier. I mean, I guess we could get into some deep philosophical shit about the whole concept of Self that I do not fucking want to touch."  
  
Because, like, what if he wasn't him? What if the backup didn't count? What if Real Václav was gone forever, and Pretend Václav had to sit here on the computer and console his boyfriend as if he was the real thing? That was _exactly_ the kind of thing he _didn't_ want to think about right now. Augs were as good as or better than normal body parts, so an uploaded consciousness was therefore as good as or better than the original. It had to be.

"I don't remember actually... dying. I thought I was just waking up. So unless there's a new backup that didn't get uploaded yet still stuck in my brain over there... I'm not sure how it happened. I'm gonna have to check the security feed once I figure out how to actually go through shit." He... was not exactly looking forward to that.

Adam’s response came abruptly and out of nowhere, like a retaining wall had collapsed.

"Vác, I-I... can't... bury you!" His voice broke again. "You're here but..." _No, no it's just... it's too much. Stop._ He needed to slam that door shut. "You're not. And you won't be again, will you?" He turned back to the monitor, though only glanced before looking away, struggling to maintain eye contact. "We... we have to... figure out something. I can't just... just leave you like... I just-"

Adam broke off, inhaling, working his jaw, and furrowing his brows. He tried to simply shove the anger at Otar to the front of his mind, all in an effort to turn this into an emotion he knew far more intimately. Nothing was working. The fall was coming. He could feel it, and holding it in was no longer an option. Red alarms screamed in his vision, offering mechanical condolences in the form of unfeeling status reports pertaining to the stress his body was under. It chose to tell him how his heart was racing like he didn’t know, and about how being in such a state would impact his tissue regeneration and scrubbers.

Technology was a modern marvel, wasn’t it?

His voice was ragged, barely a whisper. "I just want to hold you, Vác."  
  
"I... don't recommend holding me right now, man." Václav laughed nervously, because the terrible attempt at a joke kept him some kind of grounded as he stared at the camera feed of his body. Eventually, his attention moved back to Adam. He couldn't do anything for him. He was stuck in the fucking computer. Even his onscreen avatar couldn't do much but move around a little, and what good did that do?

For Adam, it was too late. It was too much. He broke. The ship was sinking, he was drowning, and he was back under the ocean. Weak. He felt so, so incredibly weak. Weren't his augmentations supposed to help him feel strong? He wasn't.

He never was.

The reality he was forced to endure was too much for him, so much so that the strength fled his body. Adam dropped to his knees, and the sound of his forearms hitting the floor as he buried his face in them was the only sound he made. The sound of crying was absent, and in the hollow emptiness where it should have been came the quiet, droning hum of monitors and electrical equipment. His arms shifted only to cover his head with one, and the clutch of his fingers digging into his own scalp forced the prominent false tendons on the back of his hand into an unnaturally cruel bend.

‘Unnaturally cruel’ sounded an awful lot like today.

> a mind once desiring peace now clamors for blood

**Author's Note:**

> AgentKaz: this was inspired by a concept i read once on tumblr that has been stewing in my brain for years, apparently. if it was your concept, lemme know so i can credit you!  
> EDIT: thanks to my cowriter here it's been found! it's this post https://saintambrose.tumblr.com/post/151625154792/shit-dude-that-fanart-is-making-me-think-of-a
> 
> thanks for the inspiration!!!!
> 
> RememberPanchaea: The name for Deus Ex: hi0ctane Run was chosen in tribute to the way that players of the series refer to their runs, such as “No Aug Run” and “Pacifist Run”. Keep this in mind as the story unfolds!
> 
> RememberPanchaea: The Adam I write suffers from intrusive thoughts as a result of untreated PTSD. These thoughts are present in indented blockquotes and contain no capitalization and punctuation. Certain ones that appear reminiscent of > text entry_ on old computers or command prompts portray a fixation, a particular detail that he's becoming hung-up on and struggling to move past.


End file.
